More Mali (2) Some of the reasons to think hard about sending troops over“…. Shall we send a few hundred Canadian troops to patrol it? Ah, but that’s not the point. The latest UN/EU plan has Western nations simply training the locals to be like us. Trouble is, they may not want that. Mali is one of the last places on Earth with large-scale slavery, apparently with considerable popular support. As many as 200,000 people are still slaves, ex-slaves suffer terrible discrimination and, as in the 2012 Tuareg Rebellion, their former owners may grab them back given half a chance. This truth is only whispered with respect to Afghanistan because conservatives don’t want to tarnish our troops’ performance and progressives don’t want to admit culture matters. But “training” Afghan security forces, as though their main problems were technical ones like literacy or radio repair, has not worked because too many Afghans are Islamists. Go ahead. Say it out loud. Too many Afghans are Islamists. So are too many people in Mali. And too many others hold scarcely less appalling beliefs and habits incompatible with prosperity and human dignity ….”

“Canada’s largest veterans facility has lifted its ban on a woman who complained about bedbugs and a threat to a resident’s safety. Following a weekend meeting, Sunnybrook said Jackie Storrison could see her aging dad at its veterans centre, from which police escorted her more than a week ago. The facility did insist security was on hand when Storrison went to see her father on Saturday. “To have security sitting outside the room was beyond humiliating,” Storrison, 61, said Sunday. “I felt as though I was under house arrest. I felt like I had been convicted of a criminal offence and basically given probation with the condition that I attend mediation.” Sunnybrook banned Storrison, who has spent most evenings over the past three years caring for her 91-year-old father at the veterans centre, after nurses apparently accused her of going on a “verbal rampage for hours on end”. Storrison, who denies being abusive, said the allegation came after she alerted staff to an elderly resident wandering down the hallway alone and on another occasion to bedbugs in a patient’s room ….”

“Canada has relatively few terrorists behind bars, but an expert on prison radicalization says the problem of Islamist ideology spreading among inmates is a real one. “This isn’t to say that all inmates will become radicals, or even that many will,” said Dr. Alexandre Wilner, a Research Fellow with the Mandonald-Laurier Institute and a terrorism expert. “But it is to suggest that prison represents a potentially good window of opportunity for spreading radical views and recruiting others to a violent cause.” Wilner’s comments follow the release of a highly censored CSIS threat assessment that confirmed that Sunni Islamist radicalization is taking place in Canadian prisons, within families and through jihadi websites. The parts of the assessment that the public has been allowed to see don’t indicate how large a problem Islamist radicalization is within Canada or offer specific examples of cases ….”- more on rehabilitating extremists in prison here.